Around my house

Last week I said I'd get some pictures up of our views. This is Cheyenne Mountain, home to NORAD and Santa tracking. NORAD is actually built inside the mountain, but there are plans to shut this facility down. Our zoo is on the side of the mountain. It's a great zoo, but it's a lot of up and down walking. I cropped the sides of this picture, because I get this view between two neighbors' houses--I'm not complaining!

This is what we see of Garden of the Gods. You might have to look close--can you see the two huge red rock formations smack in the middle of the picture? Now you know why most of my pictures are of Pikes Peak instead!
I took this picture tonight. I could see the face of Pikes Peak, but it didn't show up in my pictures. I was really aiming for the cloud color anyway.

The cool thing about our views is that we didn't even think about it when we bought this house. We vaguely knew we could see Pikes Peak, but it's pretty big, and we've lived near the mountains for a long time. It didn't seem like a big deal then. The first few nights here, we realized we could see city lights, a LOT of city lights. The first thing I do every morning is get the newspaper, and I always look at Pikes Peak. I like to check out the view from around the city too. I like the view from our end the best, but it's also stunning from the plains. Zebulon Pike first saw it as a white cloud, and I imagine that when we see it from faaaaar away.

I posted a picture of "our" fox this weekend. He's our regular visitor, but we have had some really undesirable wildlife here. The first summer we lived here was very dry (the summer of the Hayman fire), and the bears came out of the mountains. A bear got into our neighbor's garbage across the street one night, was later caught with a sibling a few blocks away, and another was killed about four blocks away. We've seen a deer walking down a nearby path. Two summers ago, a mountain lion decided to camp in someone's backyard a mile away, and it was finally killed by DOW a few days later. All of this IS unusual--we live in the middle of suburbia. When we lived in Littleton, which was also very suburban, I took photos of a coyote roaming around our street. What we don't have here that I would have expected are raccoons and skunks. Can't say I miss those!

We continued plowing through the kids' reading today. This was tricky, since Trevor had a dr. appt. this morning, and Holly had dance this afternoon, and this is a lot of reading. I made the kids bring school work to the dr.'s office, poor things, but they didn't seem to mind, and I wanted to disrupt my schedule as little as possible! I didn't do any personal reading today though, and once again, I skipped the kids' bedtime readings. I'm not on a schedule for that though. Current library fine = $1.10 and counting, and that really bothers me, gives me more motivation to finish quickly.

Trevor's diagnosis: sinus infection and referral to an allergist. The allergist recommendation doesn't surprise me. I worry this will include one of those nasty allergy patch tests on his back, but it needs to be done. He's constantly so congested, and the regular allergy meds aren't very effective.

I mailed out most of my Christmas cards today! I realized afterwards that it's a little early. But, hey, two or three years ago, I didn't get them out until the week of Christmas! I'd rather be early! I'm also getting a lot of my online shopping done. Was Thanksgiving early this year? I'm usually not this on top of things.

No blogging tomorrow for me, I have to catch up on my e-mail!